Network Storage Solutions

[Ken C.]

Over the past 2 years I have accumulated quite a bit of stuff on my laptop as well as my wife on her desktop (pics, music, backups). It has gotten to the point now where I hate having to backup our systems every other day. I do have it scheduled but that is a pain in the ass because the backups take up alot of space on our hard drives. I am now looking into network storage. This is will allow both of us to save and access our stuff without it clogging up our hard drives. Of course we will have shared files such as banking spreadsheets and family pics and music but we will also have our private files. What I am looking for is an affordable network storage device. I need something with at least 80Gig and not more than $200. Does anyone have any preferences or recommendations?

Thanks.

 

[zfox]

Hay Ken, mife? Is that a wife upside down?
(sorry, had to say that - you can yell at me tomorrow)

BTW: check Dell for this IOMEGA 160 GB High-Speed Ethernet Network Hard Drive for $220.49. It currently has a $30.00 rebate. Twice the capacity for your price limit!

Julian

 

[JohnG]

Take a look at TigerDirect, for example, and you'll find several USB 2 drives that meet your cost/storage criteria--I'll bet CompUSA or Best Buy has similar deals.

Also, you can do incremental backups instead of backing up everything 100% every time. Much, much faster, and then I've also unloaded a bunch of stuff and some full, and then incremental backups to CD to keep them offsite in worst case scenarios.

 

[J. MacDonald]

A cheap USB2 external would be the cheapest way to go, but Network Attached Storage (NAS) would be more convienient. It's one of the hottest categories in the computer biz these days. It's almost like haveing a server, but not as expensive or complicated. Basically it's like a hard drive that plugs into your network and can beaccessed buy anyone on the network. I think that's what zfox is talking about. I haven't bought one yet, so I can't make specific recs, but the PC mags seem to be rife with articles on them these days.

John

 

[NutterR]

As some of the others have mentioned, you can purchase a hard drive that can be networked. I found this one at Newegg for $180 with 160 gigs.